4 top tips when using keywords for SEO

This really is SEO 101, but you have to remember that a page full of keywords will give you no return if they aren't used in a certain way.

What are keywords? They are the words your customers will search on to find your product or service.

TIP 1: Choice of words
Use a service like Google's keyword tool to find the words your customers might use to search for you, your site, or your product/service offerings. If you don't do a little research into your keywords, you might find you're missing a whole group of customers who might be using other words to search for your services. For example, "wooden toys," "wood toys," "handmade toys, "traditional toys," etc. Try to find synonyms for your keywords.

TIP 2: Keyword density
Using the keywords in a natural context is essential because Google's search robots are sophisticated enough to pick up if you're just saying stuff to get hits. So if you want to promote your wooden toys shop don't write something like: "We sell wooden toys - all the wooden toys you could possibly want. For your wooden toys needs and extra special quality wooden toys, plus don't forget our beautiful wooden toys range, look no further. We sell wooden toys." It won't work. The Google-bots know. Once or twice is enough for any keyword and use it in a natural manner.

TIP 3: Consistent location
Where you use the words is also important. Obviously, they need to be in the main content of your page. But think about search results: Google gives you the page title, a couple of lines from the content containing the keyword, and the link. If you can get your keyword into your page title and your link, it will add credibility and make searchers more likely to click. Obviously you have to be sensible about this. Just say the wooden toy shop has a range of musical instruments with a shop page dedicated to these. The page title might be something like "Red Rover Wooden Toys - musical" and the link might be called http://www.redrover.com.au/musicaltoys/. It's about using common sense when naming your webpages and assigning file names to your webpages. If your link looks like http://redrover.com.au/183GtehhhYYwTqxt/ and the page title is the same, then people will be much more suspicious of clicking.

TIP 4: Key phrases instead of keywords
Think of this as narrowing the search to achieve better results. If you just use "blocks" for instance, you have a lot more competition from all kinds of sites featuring toy blocks, residential blocks, ice blocks, and so on. If you make your key term "wooden blocks" or "toy blocks" then you're helping the search engines bring true customers your way.

That was just 4 things to think about when using keywords for SEO. Don't forget that keywords are just one part of SEO and it's worth looking at other factors in search ranking such as the ones described at this site for webmasters: websitehelpers.com